Like many Chinese Americans my age and older, I have fond memories of going to San Francisco’s now-scarce Chinese banquet halls to mark milestones and celebrations. 

My parents had a 600-person wedding banquet at the former Empress of China in the late 1970s. For decades, my family association (mutual aid societies based on clans) had annual dinners at New Asia with up to 1,000 guests. However, these massive halls have been disappearing for several reasons: the retirement of owners, the astronomical costs of maintaining large spaces and the city’s Chinese population moving to the suburbs.

This leaves Far East Cafe as the last big banquet hall in Chinatown, with 680 seats across two floors and 15,000 square feet. Other old banquet halls like Empress of China, Four Seas and Gold Mountain have been replaced by trendier Chinese restaurants that are making their own mark on the dining scene, but their capacities are smaller.  

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A customer looks at the dim sum menu at HL Peninsula in Castro Valley, Calif., on Nov. 25, 2025.

Black pepper stir-fried beef short ribs (center) surrounded by (clockwise from top right) chive and shrimp dumplings, steamed chive and spinach dumplings, fried shrimp rangoon, shrimp rice rolls, shrimp dumplings, and four-color xiao long bao at HL Peninsula in Castro Valley, Calif., on Nov. 25, 2025.

In their places, suburban Bay Area restaurants have swooped in as a viable option: The original Koi Palace in Daly City and the former Hong Kong Flower Lounge in Millbrae bet on the Chinese and Asian suburban demographic shift when they opened in the ’90s, with 400- and 550-person capacities, respectively. And now, they are joined by what might be the biggest banquet hall in America.

In October, Bay Area Cantonese chain HL Peninsula debuted a 28,000-square-foot palace of a restaurant in Castro Valley, the census-designated place of 66,000 residents in Alameda County. With its capacity for 800 people — that includes the central dining room and 10 private dining rooms — it is being hailed as the largest Cantonese restaurant and dim sum parlor in the U.S. 

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While it’s not a bastion of Asian cuisine,........

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